And in the End
by Jude22
Summary: After years of war John MacTavish returns to an unfamiliar normalcy. War has had shaped him and he finds himself torn between life and death. Unable to cope with his past and present he struggles for survival.


And in the End

Time had almost come to an end. In a moment of haste it had closed its eyes, clenched its fist and in one silent blow wiped out almost all of humanity. The average king and queen of hypocrisy had no real idea of how they were all made to walk tightropes by a select few as they parked their cars, did their hair and crossed the streets. Some things were meant never to be seen, heard or thought of but it was now all too late.

The scars of battle were still fresh. The flesh on his thighs had turned grotesque purple with each cell constantly in a battle to sustain itself and heal the wound that remained open. His memory however was affected in a way he didn't fully understand. If the past consisted of images of gory deaths his present worked hard to remind him of how decadently close and similar a 'non-warzone' like the one he inhabited looked like. In the end it was all death, the grey Irish sky reiterated that hymn of sadness. The towering cathedral spire, that stood right outside the apartment he was offered after he survived his duty to his nation along with a few discordant badges for bravery, for planning a crucial charge down the flank and for persisting in a suicidal mission, saving the world and restoring 'order', only reminded him of how high and haughty we had become as a civilization and the plummet southwards looked rather nasty and inevitable.

The room was rather modest. A bed to his right, a study table near the window that faced St. Andrews Cathedral, a kitchen with a sink to the left of the entrance door and a bathroom to the left, and mounted on the wall in such a way that its screen was visible when one lay on the bed was a quite curious looking television unit that was rarely switched on these days. There was nothing 'new' that it could show him nor was there anything that could possibly be on it that he would want to consume. The cycle felt complete. The only thing on the four walls that had something to offer him every time his eyes scaled the walls was the lone photograph taken a year or two ago. Captain Price looked peculiarly young, the wars had still not gotten the better of him but something felt different during those last years of stagnation. Everything moved too quickly to comprehend now. It had to be slowed down- there was no other way.

At eight in the morning as the bells tolled from the adjacent building and as a crowd dispersed, old Dolores would appear at his door. Her minimal existence within the building for half a century as the manager was something MacTavish looked forward to. Her wrinkles seemed to be at ease no matter what erupted beyond the confines of her decaying castle of concrete.

"I've brought you some coffee" she said handing over a yellowed mug with a saucer placed over it that hardly matched the former's ceramic style. Her transactions with her tenants were overpowered with a cold impersonality that she had developed but Soap, as they called him, was someone she knew right from the time he roamed around as a child with his family in her husband's estate hunting rabbits and roasting beef beside a warm fire place; and so when the government requested that she open up her apartment to a war veteran she was more than happy to have him. But things had changed now; the past was no longer within reach for MacTavish. The image of his father was lost among a catalogue of carcasses that resulted as a result of his tryst with his call, his duty for obscure causes prompted and dictated by obscure men at obscure costs.

When the doorbell rang the second time he was surprised at how loud a tiny electric bell could be shattering his canopy of stillness he donned every day. It was Dolores again.

"Thought you would need something to kill time."

Death was all around. The barrel looked him right in his mind's eye. She handed a newspaper, a few magazines that lay around the reception and a paperback.

"Thanks" he said. His usual silence to anything and everything surprised himself. "It would be nice if you could arrange for some cloth, for the curtains, the windows are too loud."

Looking straight back at him, Dolores with the dignity of her age asked him "Loud?"

"I meant too many people, too many things happening all at once without really knowing what exactly is happening to them or anything… I meant too bright" he said saving himself the shame of flawed logic.

"Fine" she said as she went down the dimly lit stairs.

The paperback became his companion for a few days. He sat still on his bed looking at the floor shifting his bloodshot eyes from the cover of the paperback to the floor and back to his hands and the wounds that ate his robust flesh. The grenades, the flashes that blinded his task force, the sprays of red and its salty taste from the tender arteries of the men that trained with him and shared bunkers, the bursts of gun fire from distant corners, the soot that spread across the war torn skies they all came back with vivid detail. He was an old man now though his body had not aged much; He wanted the silence that Santiago and his still seas had to offer. He wanted the freedom to glide through unexplored tracts of blue only the marlin could afford. But the boundaries of his room were well defined. The boundaries of his imagination were too well defined and that made all the difference.

The coffee today tastes different he thought. It felt overpowering and visuals of the black liquid filling his body flashed before his eyes. The liquid came to a halt somewhere at the centre of his diaphragm. Then black mixed with red and spilled out of his mouth turning his vision into a haze of colours mixing and merging. As he fell from his bed to the cold floor the gun fire grew loud, the grenades and shrapnel pounded his flesh from all sides, the flanks gave in and raised white flags, masked men charged from ambushes, flash bangs exploded turning the greys of reality into the absoluteness of white. He was a traveller of both time and space.

Words haunted him "It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers." Death failed to escape the fangs of guilt.


End file.
